Monday, April 13, 2015

Smug, self-satisfied and phenomenally rich Hillary Clinton has
officially declared herself a candidate for the presidency… again. Only someone
that rich could, with a straight face call herself the champion of the people.

Apparently, she is trying to give the lie to the old
American adage that you can’t fool all the people all the time.

Hillary’s is not the first, but hopefully hers will be the
last paper candidacy. By that I mean that her resume looks great on paper but
lacks substantive achievements. It gives new meaning to the concept of “token.”

Why is she running?

Easy question; easy answer. Hillary believes that the
American people owe it to her.

Considering what she had to endure at the hands of Bubba,
considering the serial humiliations she suffered to make him and to keep him president, she
believes, not irrationally, that the country owes it to her. If you thought that the Obama campaign was a massive guilt trip, get ready for the Hillary guilt trip.

Unfortunately, the start of her campaign did not augur well.
In her press release she defined herself with a poorly written sentence that
was marred by a Freudian slip. Commentators have called it a typo, but when you
leave a word out, that’s called a Freudian slip. A typo is this: tipo.

The sentence reads. Note how many times she uses words about
children. She is appealing to mothers:

From her mother’s own
childhood – in which she was abandoned by her parents – to her work going
door-to-door for the Children’s Defense Fund to her battling to create the
Children’s Health Insurance Program, she’s fought children and families all her
career.

It
should be well-enough known by political operatives by now: the American people
often judge their candidates by how well they run their campaigns. A candidate
who cannot run a campaign is less likely to be able to run the country.

As
it happens, we have learned, to our chagrin, that the candidate who ran two of
the most masterful campaigns in recent history had no notion of how to govern…
but, such is life.

Clearly,
a candidate who cannot get her announcement statement right has organizational
difficulties and leadership problems. Or else, she is so smug and
self-satisfied that she ignores such minor details.

Does
that remind you of Benghazi?

It’s
not just that Hillary declares in her statement that she “fought children and
families”… which may well describe someone who once wrote a book about how
villages should bring up children… but that she dangles a modifier and ends up
saying that she was doing it from the time of her mother’s own childhood.

Yes,
I know that some eminent linguists say that you should not worry about dangling
modifiers. In fact, you should. They make you sound barely literate.

As
if that was not bad enough, as soon as Hillary announced, a series of posters
appeared on the streets of Brooklyn, in the subways of New York and in Las
Vegas:

I
do not know anything about the group that put them up. The posters are clever
and effective. One suspects that a conservative group did it, but conservative
groups rarely indulge in street art. When they do they do not do it very well.

Nevertheless,
the posters respond to the Clinton campaign’s efforts to control public
discourse by preemptively declaring certain adjectives sexist and misogynist
when applied to Hillary.

As
I said, it was surely effective. It’s all over the media.

As
for the fair and balanced approach to the Hillary candidacy, no one is better
at forecasting elections than former New York Times and current ESPN
wunderkind, Nate Silver.

According
to Silver, the odds are 50/50 that Hillary Clinton will be elected president. That will either make or ruin your day.

What
are the salient facts?

Silver
lists them.

The
first is the popularity of the current president, a president who belongs to
the same party as Mrs. Clinton:

Clinton’s chances will be affected by Obama’s
popularity as he exits office. The relationship between the popularity of the
previous president and the performance of the new nominee from his party isn’t
perfect — Al Gore (narrowly) lost in 2000 despite Bill Clinton’s popularity,
for example — but it certainly matters some, especially given that Clinton
served in Obama’s cabinet.

Second is the state of the
economy during the run up to the election.

Silver writes:

… the economy will matter a lot to voters, and a
better economy will help Clinton, the candidate from the incumbent party. As
Byron York points
out, you should be wary of claims that 2016 will be a “foreign policy
election.”3

What
do we know about the state of the economy in Fall of 2016? Next to nothing:

Historically, economists have shown almost no
ability to predict the rate of economic growth more than six months in advance.

Keep that in mind the next time
you are bowing down to some guru economist.

Some have suggested that
demographics strongly favor the Democrats.

Silver responds:

What about that “blue wall” — the supposed
advantage that Democrats hold in the Electoral College?

Mostly, the “blue wall” was the effect of
Obama’s success in 2008 and 2012, not the cause of it. If the economy had
collapsed in the summer of 2012, Obama would probably have lost the election,
and most of those blue states would have turned red.

He adds:

Another theory — the so-called “Emerging
Democratic Majority” — holds that demographic trends favor the
Democratic Party. We’ll have a lot more to say about this theory between now
and next November, but it’s probably dubious too.4 As
Sean Trende has pointed
out, it relies on a selective reading of the evidence — emphasizing 2012,
2008 and 2006 but ignoring 2014, 2010, and 2004. Perhaps more important,
predictions made on the premise of “emerging” majorities have a miserable track
record: Republicans were bragging about their “permanent” majority in 2004, for
instance, only to get their butts kicked in 2006 and 2008.

Of course, Hillary is far better
known than the other candidates:

Clinton is so well-known, in fact, that it’s
almost as if voters are dispensing with all the formalities and evaluating her
as they might when she’s on the ballot next November. About half of them would
like to see her become president and about half of them wouldn’t. Get ready for
an extremely competitive election.

But, how well do voters
really know Hillary? Will they continue to find her “likeable enough?” What
will the upcoming campaign tell them?

9 comments:

JPL17
said...

I believe the campaign is being run by the Los Angeles underground artist Sabo, who was responsible for those great Ted Cruz "blacklisted and loving it" posters of a couple years back, and the more recent series of "Obama Drone" posters. He has a website where you can see his work: http://unsavoryagents.com/

Hey, folks, it's time for the SEVENTH Annual Tour of The Summer Of Recovery! Get your tickets NOW and we'll let you know if they're coming to a Venue Near You! Online at www.summerofrecovery.com or call 1-800-IMAFOOL; operators ARE standing by for your calls!

re: What do we know about the state of the economy in Fall of 2016? Next to nothing: Historically, economists have shown almost no ability to predict the rate of economic growth more than six months in advance.

Agreed. We have dot-com crisis of 1999-2001 and dot-house crisis of 2008-2009, so perhaps we'll make it to 2016-17 for the dot-euro-debt-collapse or dot-china-debt-collapse crisis or something else?

Its hard to see the imminent crisis for the U.S, but if any appear, we can always we decide to start two new unfunded wars paid for by a tax cut, but of course such a great idea can probably keep the economy humming for 5 bonus years of fake economics.

Hillary seems itching to become a war president and all the republicans except Rand Paul would seem to double down on any buster she will propose in her campaign.

Whatever the truth of incompetence of Benghazi you can be sure it will pale compared to the next excuse for a war drum.

Lastly I'm still wondering how the oil market price crash will reverse again. Will U.S. oil production gains crash on losses of pyramid financing, or can we wait for political chaos in Saudi Arabia or elsewhere save our domestic production?

There are so many interesting questions that won't be discussed in the next 15 months.

Probably there are no longer any relevant issues that can be discussed, because all the important ones have no solutions, and no real diagreement from Left or Right. We know $30 trillion will go to the banks in the next bailout crisis, and its just a matter of timing. What else besides senseless wars can compare to that?

I'm so glad I can't watch TV. Digitalized TV signals with crappy signal quality saved me from so much anguish.

p.s. The inspiration of the "don't say" campaign doesn't come from Clinton, but Amy Chozick's tweets...http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2015/03/26/the-13-words-you-cant-write-about-hillary-clinton-anymore/-----------So these words are now off the table: "polarizing," "calculating," "disingenuous," "insincere," "ambitious," "inevitable," "entitled," "over-confident," "secretive," "will do anything to win," "represents the past," and "out of touch." -----------

But then perhaps its just a hoax set up to mock Hillary supporters?

I admit its hard to tell what's real these days. True-blue supporters who forego rational thought can parody themselves without much help.http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121399/internet-outrage-machine-finally-ready-hillary----------There’s a problem with this frenzy over the Super Volunteers. It’s not just that the group isn’t in any way tied to Clinton’s unofficial campaign—it’s that it barely even qualifies as a group. “We're not at all attached to the campaign, not at all,” John West, sender of the infamous email, told the Washington Examiner, which actually did some real reporting on the story. “All we are is a Facebook group of Democrats. We met in 2007 and stayed connected afterwards.”---------

Getting the person who made those internet videos may be the one thing Hillary has accomplished. I am amazed that people are surprised that Hillary fumbled her great announcement. If one took a legal pad and started listing the things Hillary has fumbled one would have a number of pages filled with examples. A list of positive and negative accomplishments would be instructive.If to err is human then Hillary has at least accomplished that. Has anyone seen Hillary riding in the "Mystery Machine?" Does anyone else see the humor in this?